We recently just had our 2009 sales kick off here at ReachForce. This time we focused part of the day on nurturing prospects in the sales opportunity funnel. Typically once leads are flipped into the sales funnel it means hands off for marketing. Sales people take over all communications at this point.

Here, we use Salesforce for our CRM and Eloqua for our Marketing Automation. We are able to push marketing campaign activities directly into Salesforce but once a lead is converted, it can’t be converted back to a lead if the prospect goes quiet or isn’t quite ready to buy. Why not salesforce.com? Why not? You’re making it so hard for us to really build a closed loop system. Anyway…

To help our sales team stay in regular communication with their prospects in the opportunity funnel we’ve (marketing) put together a few things to help them. Here’s what our sales team is now armed with:

• A daily prospect intelligence report – a news feed with any public news from companies in our sales funnel. This gives our sales team a little more insight into the company they are selling in to and gives them a reason to follow up if they run across some applicable news. You can do this with Google Alerts too. Set one up for your biggest prospects and see what they have to say or what is being said about them.
• Best Practice email templates in Salesforce – we (marketing) put together a series of emails and added them to Salesforce so our sales team can access them when they need them. My recommendation here was to periodically send best practice or thought leadership pieces to prospects to stay top of mind. These are not sales oriented emails, these are adding value emails. But, they can be customized to fit each prospect’s specific situation. I’m really interested to see if and how they actually use these.
• Blog posts – The B2B Lead is all about giving our readers good B2B Marketing and Sales tips to help them in their day to day jobs. So as we are adding new posts we’re making sure we are sharing those with our sales team. They can then forward these along to prospects when applicable. Not everything is for everyone but who knows, that one tip they forward on might just get them to move. And, who doesn’t want tips that will help them be better at their job?
• Newsletter – we have a very popular opt-in newsletter, in fact, our subscription list grew by 50% over the last 8 or so months. Our newsletter isn’t ReachForce promotional, instead we pull our best tips from The B2B Lead and put them together in a newsletter format. For this, we’ve just added a check box to the Salesforce contact record and if the sales rep wants us to include them in this group, they just mark the box.

So here’s what we just rolled out, what are you doing to nurture prospects already in the sales funnel? And who owns this nurturing? Marketing? Sales? Both?

Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series.  Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.

• Dianna Huff’s Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now
• What we had to say…

• Brian Carroll’s Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation
• What we had to say…

• HubSpots’s Get Found Online
• What we had to say…

• Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
• What we had to say…

• David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
• What we had to say…

• ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
• What we had to say…

Happy Reading.  We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.

This is the second post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention.

Sales teams are always clamoring for more leads but smart marketers know that what they really need to deliver are qualified buyers.  A lead status is often applied to anyone who fills out a form on your website or stops by your trade show booth.  Rather than tossing that list of names over to sales, marketers must nurture those leads and weed out the good from the bad, those with budget and need from those still in the education phase.

Deliberate Marketing ensures marketers can extract the most value from their marketing programs based on using the most cost-effective method to move prospects and buyers through the funnel. It is not focused on simply filling the marketing and sales funnel with contacts and expecting sales to follow-up on any lead that downloads a whitepaper.

Deliberate Marketing is about profiling the best possible buyers, recruiting more buyers that are just like them, and then executing the most effective techniques possible to move the prospect through each stage of the funnel.

In this whitepaper, Marketo sets up a great analogy between Lead Nurturing and Dating that we can all learn from (lead nurturing that is, you’re in the wrong place if you are looking for dating tips).  I don’t want to regurgitate the whitepaper, so I will just expand on a few things that Marketo touches on.

Marketo talks about the introduction to your prospect or “date”.  If you are looking for a long term commitment, be sure you are looking for your type.  If you know your best dates are tall, dark, and handsome, then that is who you should be looking for.  Do you know your “type”  when it comes to prospects?  Do you know you are looking for high tech firms with 1000+ employees that are in the bay area or are you looking for healthcare companies with 20,000+ employees on the east coast?  You have to create a profile of your ideal “mate” or customer; after all you don’t want to flirt with (market to) everyone.

Marketo also says you should be where your potential dates or prospects are.  If you know you like tall, dark, and handsome, don’t travel to Sweden looking for your mate.  If you know your prospects prefer LinkedIn to Facebook, then that is where you should be too.  Don’t waste your time creating Facebook ads and pages – you are not trying to catch every fish in the sea.  Instead, create a group on LinkedIn and participate in LinkedIn Answers.

The whitepaper goes into a few ideas for building your thought leadership.  Whitepapers and eBooks are both great but again knowing your audience will pay off here as well.  The eBook may be the “hip and stylish younger sibling to the nerdy whitepaper,” David Meerman Scott, but if you are trying to reach a highly technical audience, a well written and detailed whitepaper may be a better fit.

I guess my point, once again, is know your customer.  For another analogy, you have to know what kind of fish you are going after so you can use the right bait (shrimp, worms, cheese) and hang your line in the right kind of water (fresh water, salt water).  Casting a wide net will get you a lot, but will it get what you are looking for?  Are you using the right bait to catch your next customer, ie whitepapers, eBooks, blogs?  Are you in the right kind of water, ie on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or in person tradeshows?

Be sure to read the whitepaper for the full analogy (they do a much better job than I).  For those of you who have read the whitepaper, what did you think?  I know I left out a lot.  What great lead nurturing tips (or heck, I’ll take dating tips at this point too – not for me though, I’m engaged) did you get out of it?

Marketo provides B2B marketing automation software that translates marketing spending into revenue. Their award-winning lead management software features email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and closed-loop reporting capabilities to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability.

Next Thursday, we will be chatting about David Meeman Scott’s eBook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing (no I am not stalking him, but yes I am a superfan).

If you’ve been doing B2B Marketing for any length of time you know who Brian Carroll is.  If you don’t know who he is, you should.  His eBook, Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation, is a must read for “lead generation specialists committed  to the long-term proposition that digging for leads, educating prospects, navigating the nuances of the complex sale and creating new, high-level return on investment is what has brought lead generation to the position it enjoys in the marketing hierarchy today”.

I read this eBook a couple of years ago but I was due a refresher.  While all 8 factors are important to lead generation success, I pulled out a few things we could all benefit from doing or ensuring on a more regular basis.  My summary and highlights by no means replaces reading the eBook.

• Remember you are creating conversations, not campaigns – “Companies don’t buy, people do.”  With each lead generation initiative we are developing an ongoing relationship with the prospect.  We are educating and providing value with each touch.  Or at least we should be.
• Be sure you have identified an Ideal Customer Profile before getting started – we’ve talked about personas many times on The B2B Lead. Building out the ideal customer profile makes everyone’s job easier.  Why wouldn’t you do it?
• Universal Lead Definition – it’s key that both Sales and Marketing agree on this.  “There is consensus that sales functionaries fail to act on nearly 80% of the leads they get, largely because most of the leads aren’t qualified, or because appropriate buyers haven’t been identified and targeted.”
• Your database – your most valuable marketing asset.  “The properly designed and well-maintained database is the hub of all lead generation activity and communication.”
• Lead nurturing – we all know it takes multiple touches to turn a contact to a lead and a lead to a real prospect.  “Lead nurturing is not a single marketing campaign, but rather a series of steps and communication tactics with the objective of developing and building a relationship with the potential customer.”  Automation tools make this easier than ever.  No more excuses to not nurturing.

This is only a few highlights from the eBook, now go read it yourself if you haven’t already.  If nothing else, the pictures/diagrams are worth your time.

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, Inc. part of the MECLABS Group that owns MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill 2006) and the B2B Lead Generation Blog with expertise related to B2B marketing, lead generation and complex sales.

Once you’re done with this one go ahead and download next week’s eBook – HubSpot’s Get Found Online.  We’ll be chatting about it next Thursday here on The B2B Lead.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for marketing automation software company Marketo.

There’s always been a lot of drama around how marketing can best contribute to and improve the sales cycle. In fact, one common way to measure the effectiveness of a new marketing initiative is by looking for improvements in the sales cycle. Businesses have always focused on the sales cycle, so that’s the way to go, right? Wrong!

Companies need to stop thinking only about the sales cycle and instead focus on what I call the “Revenue Cycle,” which starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. The old model of a linear handoff from marketing to sales must give way to an intertwined model where both organizations jointly own prospect relationships and coordinate their activities. To use an analogy, imagine a fighter jet that first ran with just the left engine, then turned that engine off and lit up the right engine. That’s pretty inefficient compared to lighting both engines and going full speed!

Before defining the revenue cycle in more depth, it is worth examining why the traditional “sales cycle” is the wrong model for businesses to follow. The primary reason is that the sales cycle looks at only a portion of the complete revenue process, and this presents two main problems:

• Looking at sales alone as the predictor of revenue is misleading – with sales only, companies can’t manage and guide growth beyond the current or subsequent quarter. The Sales cycle can usually predict revenue in the short term, but because the sales forecast is based on what a specific account will do at a specific time, it becomes increasingly inaccurate for predicting future revenue. Asking the sales organization — which by definition is focused on revenue in the near term — to predict revenue in future quarters is typically highly misleading. For this, a company should look to the function that is inherently focused on the long term: the marketing organization.
•  Inefficiencies are killing productivity and marketing budgets – without the right processes in place, sales is less effective and companies are wasting marketing budgets. The traditional model of a sales cycle that begins when sales accepts a marketing lead or contacts a prospect directly results in waste and inefficiency. It means as much as 50% of sales time is spent on unproductive prospecting, while reps simultaneously ignore 80% of marketing leads. We’ve estimated that the resulting lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies at least $1 trillion a year. The sales cycle mentality also ignores the fact that throughout the customer lifecycle (before, during, and after sales interacts with a prospect or customer), marketing has been and will continue to touch the prospect with marketing messages via the website, campaigns, advertising, and PR.

So how do you start driving your business by managing the Revenue Cycle? The Revenue Cycle requires coordinating marketing and sales activities throughout the entire cycle to generate maximum impact. The key is to realize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the process. Marketing brings a long-term view, sales brings an action-oriented view. Marketing is good at one-to-many communications, automated processes, and dealing with lots of data; sales is good at building personal relationships and leveraging the human touch.

The Revenue Cycle must start from the day a company first meets a prospect and continue through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. As marketing and sales coordinate their activities as part of a unified Revenue Cycle, companies will get better at lead scoring and properly identifying and prioritizing opportunities. That creates better quality leads that result in easier and better quality sales cycles, with more wins and ultimately more revenue. While there will still be a time when primary ownership of a lead shifts, the Revenue Cycle eliminates the “handoff” from marketing to sales. Instead, both functions should be engaged in the right way throughout the entire Revenue Cycle: lead nurturing campaigns can come on behalf of the sales rep, marketing messages and the website can continue to support the sales process once sales does engage, and sales leads that go cold can be recycled back to marketing. With marketing and sales acting as equally important drivers of revenue, companies can gain a picture of the complete revenue process, ensuring that leads are properly nurtured and do not fall out of the cycle midway and get lost.

Of course, truly replacing the sales cycle with a coordinated Revenue Cycle is easier said than done, but the benefits are clear: increased sales productivity, greater return on marketing spending, and better visibility into the long-term performance and health of the business. What company doesn’t want to be able to better predict revenue and grow their business? The shift won’t happen overnight, but the first step is changing our thinking and embracing the new model: the Revenue Cycle.

For more tips like this one, download ReachForce’s eBook on 10 Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment co-sponsored by Marketo.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company Marketo.

I recently wrote about why sales and marketing can’t get along. Here are some practical tips to start bridging the gap!

1. Model the entire revenue cycle. As opposed to a standalone sales cycle, focus on an integrated revenue cycle that starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. This helps each team understand what the other is doing, and how their actions help facilitate revenue.

2. Develop a common vocabulary. Part of an integrated revenue cycle is common definitions for each stage. When marketing sits down with sales and says, “what is the definition of a good sales lead, and how can we help?” the dynamic between the two departments changes. With the definition of sales-ready in hand, marketing can begin rebuilding trust by delivering leads that meet that definition. This common language and metrics is essential for communication between the functions.

3. Look for operational disconnects. Too often, sales energy and promotions are focused in a different direction than marketing’s most recent campaigns. In some cases, they can even be in conflict! In one example, the sales team had an incentive to sell a product that marketing was planning to discontinue in the next month. Make sure that initiatives and promotions are aligned by developing plans jointly and meeting monthly or at least quarterly.

4. Create a closed-loop reporting process. Marketing needs to have a way to follow-up with sales to see how well leads are performing. This can be a field in the CRM system, a regular call, or even an automated survey. Just make sure it’s easy for the rep to respond. It can be as basic as sending the rep an email two weeks after receiving a lead with the subject “Was lead ABC good?” This way, they can simply reply “Yes” or “No”, which they can easily do on their Blackberry or in a hotel room. Closing the loop like this can help tune lead generation efforts, and is an important way to take qualified prospects that are not yet sales ready and recycle them back into marketing for lead nurturing.

5. Share accountability between the teams. Marketing is a very measurable process, but the results are head to measure; it’s easy to measure Sales outcomes but Sales activity is hard to measure. As a result, compensation and rewards tend to be very different, which creates further problems. So be sure to review how each team is compensated and rewarded to ensure alignment. (One typical disconnect: marketing focuses on the number of new deals while sales is focused on the amount and size of the total pipeline.) The better your ability to measure marketing ROI, the easier it is to bridge this gap.

6. Foster respect and trust. Perhaps most importantly, in particular, building alignment between marketing and sales organizations starts with a common set of values and shared beliefs. If the two functions don’t fundamentally believe the other has the same set of goals in mind, it will be much more difficult to drive alignment. This is rooted in good and regular communication, but it can be challenging to repair years of miscommunication all at once. Start by focusing on small wins (for example, look for a particular rep who closed a big deal because of a marketing lead) and promote the result aggressively. By having a “victory parade” for small wins, you will begin the process of better communication and trust.

Check out our rock star Leigh Anne on Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog!  In her interview she highlights tips for business blogging and what has worked for us on The B2B Lead.

Some of her points/tips:

• Why the domain or URL of your blog is important, our domain is separate from ReachForce.  We wanted to build a place for B2BMarketers to come and share tips and not have to worry about ReachForce corporate speak or promotion.  Now don’t get me wrong, I try and slip it in every once in awhile but subtly, hopefully.
• Blogging is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader
• Blogging is a good tool for lead nurturing and can lead to speaking opportunities
• Don’t forget, you need to post frequently to keep readers engaged
• Be sure to re-purpose content for email campaigns and newsletters
• Most important – know your audience and produce valuable content

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo

Most leads from B2B marketing campaigns are still researching. Prematurely passing these early leads to sales only annoys the buyer and makes sales even less likely to follow-up on marketing leads. This means the majority of inquiries require further lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.

This is where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads — meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs equal 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line.

How can you use lead scoring to achieve this kind of benefit for your organization?

First of all, too many companies use only basic demographic data (e.g. title, company size, etc.) in scoring. This is useful, but demographic data only tell how interested you are in the prospect—and nothing about how interested the prospect is in you. Even BANT criteria (budget, authority, timing, and need) have limited usefulness since buyers’ answers to those questions are notoriously inaccurate, and as we all know, people’s actions speak louder than their words. This means you should also track a lead’s behaviors so you can you measure their interest and engagement in your solution.

Begin by monitoring and tracking online behaviors, such as email responses, completed forms, and Web site visits. You can do this manually with web analytics, or automate the process using marketing automation software. Assign a point value to each, just as you would assign a value to each job title. Certain behaviors – such as using your company brand name in a search, visiting your pricing page, or returning frequently to your site – indicate higher readiness to buy, so assign even higher weights to those behaviors. Since B2B purchases typically involve 6 to 21 different people, add up the scores for each contact at a given company to measure the total level of engagement for that organization. Finally, be sure to lower the score over time if engagement goes down.

Review the point values with the sales team, and decide what score indicates sales-readiness. If the sales team determines a prospect is not yet ready, recycle the lead back to marketing for additional nurturing. Finally, be sure to close the loop and refine your scoring rules and point values over time for continuous improvement.

Want more details? Here’s a link to a free eBook from Marketo called Best Practices in Lead Scoring.